Looks like SOE Goofed

[Fesser]

Man I'm glad I didn't log in yesterday! Good luck Ngreth and everyone else at Sony trying to fix this mess. I'm just glad they didn't ignore it and pretend there was no mess to fix!

[Xislaben]

Presumably (since I of course don't know) characters are saved in a backup database somewhere periodically. As they play their information changes, and it's probably reasonable to assume that every single stat change does not cause the char's info to go to this backup, but rather it's done on some sort of timed interval, with perhaps a forced push before some larger patches.

If that is the case, it would be reasonable to query the differences between the character's stored info and their current info, and look for unreasonable differences. Say they went from 50 in tailoring or tinkering to 300 in 1 week's time. That strikes me as a bit difficult to pull off. Or somebody went from 50 to 1000 aa's in a week. The excessive abusers should be relatively easy to spot, presuming there's backup states of characters prior to the patch that are queriable in a relational database.

Other things may be quite dificult to find, like somebody who bought tons of items and moved them to an alt on the same account, or to another account entierly. They could have, being clever little halfings, dropped items on the ground for another character to pick up in the event that character trades are logged. I have no idea how you would trace that.

I have heard it said that every item in game has a unique id and can have its history traced, but frankly I find that hard to believe. They're probably just rolling back the accounts that bought from the beta npc's, which may well be logged. I'm a bit sad to hear that shared banks were not affected.

[Xenephex]

I wanted to add one thing that dawned on me this morning (reading through the endless messages related to this on the official boards).

I would be willing to bet that somebody at SOE had to convince the powers that be that this was a big enough deal to enough people to justify the effort of tracking down the items and rolling back characters. Somebody who was aware of how important this might be to the tradeskill community. I've got a pretty good idea of who that might of been. So...

Thanks.

[Taraddar]

Ouch thats harsh Dutchy.

Really the best option would have been a prompt emergency patch and a full roll back. Half hour or even an hour during the middle of the day right after a patch would have effected minimal people. This partial rollback of them trying to track down everything that happened is just asking for problems.

I'd definitely petition the loss of pp and the missing augs since they where legitimate things.

[Wymp]

Might not be a way to track people that drop-traded supplies to another toon, but I sure hope they can do something about the shared banks, too. Seems to me they could just check it for the accounts that had any character rolled back for this. That's still 20 stacks of exploitation sitting there, potentially.

I wasn't online when all this happened; but, while I'll admit it would've been tempting, it's so obviously unintended that I'd have had to pass or petition it to find out for sure first, heh.

I mean, honestly .. anyone who has spent any time doing tradeskills at all or even just shopping in the Bazaar would know that those merchant items would never just suddenly pop up for sale one day for super-cheap in PoK, and especially without any notice at all. Somebody would've signed that one if was intentional. It would've been a monumental change.

I do feel for the people that were unaware of the problem to begin with and just bought things as they normally would but from others that had used the merchants. They'll get rolled back and probably not even know why unless they follow the boards.

But, it is good to see that they are trying to get as many as they can. And from what I've heard from some people, they are tracking it pretty far. It may not be a perfect solution, but it's better than nothing .. and too late to do anything else.

[Dutchy]

Ouch thats harsh Dutchy.
I'd definitely petition the loss of pp and the missing augs since they where legitimate things.

Just got 2 GMs responding to the petitions
I just officially gave up my hope of this mess being fixed....
After my friend losing 400K+ worth of augments due to me cutting and combining them prior to me shopping at the NPC's, he's lost all of them and the responce from both GM's was: "We will not be able to reimburse you any items lost due to a rollback." Rollback however did conveniently remove all his pure effect augments but never reimbursed him the pp he spend on them in the first place. Fact that he borrowed 200K to invest in those augments and that being gone too now ain't helping much.... (and he never bought anything from the NPC's).

With GM responces like that, it does not appear Sony is making an effort to undo the remainer of the damage their bug has caused. Innocent players are getting no reimbursal and can just wave goodbye to their plat loss once again, while people that took advantage of the bug can apperantly hang on to their stuff.

*sighs deeply and bangs her head against the wall*

[Phantron]

I'm going to guess maybe 1% of the people got rolled back, and certainly I don't see how it can be more than 10% of the people that got rolled back from talking to people in general, and there's already all these horrible accidents. Yet, people thought it'd have been perfectly fine to roll back the entire server which would be anywhere from 10 to 100 times the number of people affected? If you say 10% guys at 10 hours is the same as 100% guys at 1 hour (which isn't true because anyone who got rolled back should have some awareness of the event and minimize what they do in the time period), rolling back the server for 1 hour is anywhere between rolling back 10 to 100 hours of playing for the currently afflicted population.

[Cruento]

it would have been fine to rollback the entire server, because then everyone would have the plat they had before, the items they had before and the skills and aa's they had before.

in dutchy's case, her friend would never have had the borrowed pp in his possession, she would never have done the combines, and her friend would never have had the augments to begin with... so then he could borrow the money again, she could do the combines again and he could receive the augments again.

i agree that every server needed to be completely rolled back and repatched, raid guilds can always raid again, and people can always grind a bit more for xp. if it hurts too much, just tack on a week of free subscription to every player, in exchange for their lost few hours. too late now.

[Phantron]

I know some guy who got rolled back and lost all his gear (rolled to a state while dead and it gets rid of your corpses so you can't store what you got on corpses). There is no reason to believe this incident is any more or less likely to happen despite the duration involved since as long as you're dead at the time they choose to roll back to, then there's a chance this will happen.

So instead of rolling 1% of the people back for about 10 hours, now you roll back 100% of the people for 1 hours. You've 10 times the total amount of man-hours lost. You're also expecting 100 times the amount of people who end up with no gear since this event does not have any correlation with how far you're rolled back. Further people will be losing their gear despite having absolutely nothing to do with the exploit.

It is unfortunate those who are involved directly or indirectly got messed up, but you're basically saying screw the rest of the server too for your misfortune.

[Cruento]

no, what i am saying is that every server should be returned to the precise state it was when they brought down the servers for the patch... so your friend's corpse that was there before patching would still be there.

and to clarify, i have not logged on since last sunday. even if i did, i realize that buying things off of misplaced vendors can get you banend and is definitely the wrong thing to do. remember the banker that was misplaced in befallen, who people used to dupe a bunch of plat because you could exchange copper for plat at a 1:1 rate, and then convert plat to copper again for a huge increase? this is very similar. everyone who bought things off of those merchants, used the merchants to get free AA, or to generate a bunch of plat from thin air knew they were doing something wrong.

what should have been done is to simply make the servers as if they had never been brought back up again after the patch. to make the servers exactly as they had been when they were brought down.

[Fonceur]

Getting reports of people getting rolled back for buying food and drink in the bazaar... Loosing raid loot obtained hours after the whole mess, now this is just ridiculous...

[Kinaki]

I lost the subcombines to 5 AAAA's, GM greaves, helm, boots, 2 wrists, & gloves. And I never even stepped foot into PoK. I'm fuming. They sure as hell better reimburse me.

[Dutchy]

As an update: Good News! Seems like they are getting to all the shared bank slots, the stuff I bought that was still in there has been removed =)

On the downside... I just noticed the 400-500K I still had in my shared bank slot from weeks before the patch have been removed as well..... argghh =(

[CaiserSoze]

bought a stack of quintessences last night... and got rolled back mid-raid. grrr

[joatmoneq]

Oi

All I can say to all this is that Sony has shown that they have learned nothing from their recent DRM lessons regarding customer treatment.

All sorts of horror stories are starting to pop up on the SOE boards now, and if even a quarter of them are true..... I think that script they used to fix this issue for them wasn't fully tested. (like DRM fix again)
It sounds like if you bought anything off the Beta Merchants, you got infected. And then if you have any sort of trade contact with any other player you get them infected too. Reports of folks having no interaction with any form of purchases or sales at all. Until they have a guildy summon them mage pet toys, or water, and then getting rolled back. I am hoping that there was more to it than that, but it almost looks like its spreading like a virus now.

Pok was insane tonight, 2 guides (no GMs to be found) had to guts to show up to try to calm people down, but but they were pretty much shouted out of the zone by a large crowd of angry people after the Guides reported that no items, flags, plat, etc would be returned by anyone rolled back regardless of the reason they were rolled back.